The Dealer is the Devil Read online

  With Bardon gone from Papunya, the painting room had fallen into disarray and closed. Though Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd was finally incorporated in November 1972, the business was moribund, and on the point of closure by May 1973. The artists were painting in their camps and, despite their distrust, accepting the advances of white men who approached them individually to purchase works. When, in August 1973, Bardon returned with an Australia Council grant, such was the unbridled excitement that during this highly productive six-week period many of the greatest masterpieces ever produced by artists of the Western Desert were created. Even so, there were already hundreds of artworks stacked along the walls of the Papunya storeroom and down the hallway. They were priced at $20–$45 each. Amongst them were a number of the finest early works by Johnny Warangkula, Kaapa and Tim Leura – paintings that later sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

  During Bardon’s first 18 months in the community about 20 artists painted around 1,000 paintings. By 1972, when Peter Fannin was appointed as the first art adviser, there were twice this number. Fannin’s workload increased dramatically in June, when more than 200 people decided to get out of Papunya and moved to Yayayi Bore outstation, where the young anthropologist Fred Myers was conducting fieldwork. Many continued to paint. There were more than 600 unsold paintings two years later, when Janet Wilson24 became art adviser and Dick Kimber acted as field officer.25 Many of them had no record of the artist, let alone a description of the subject matter. Kimber began taking artists to visit their country to renew their connections to sites of cultural significance. This had the dual benefit of increasing the quality and intensity of the paintings, and improving their documentation.26

  The AAB now made a vital decision. Despite operating on just 4 per cent of the total Australia Council annual budget, it began actively purchasing and commissioning art and craft directly from artists and art cooperatives, instead of giving out grants. By the following year the Board’s acquisitions ranged across Arnhem Land, the Tiwi Islands and the Western Desert. Before long, it too had barks, artefacts and canvases stacked along the office walls. Its purchases, and those of a few dedicated retailers, kept the nascent art movement alive in the face of intense bureaucratic pressure from government auditors.27 In Sydney, the government’s marketing operation, The Company, opened a gallery in Harrington Street in the Rocks district, Sydney, while another independent gallery opened in the nearby Argyle Arts Centre. Even so, the retail market was still so underdeveloped that sales failed to meet expectations. Jennifer Isaacs approached commercial galleries such as those run by the émigré art dealer Rudy Komon, Kim Bonython and Terry Clune, but she was unable to gain their interest.28 The AAB offered small collections to galleries and museums, but few would accept them.29

  In 1974, the AAB and The Company organised the exhibition Art of the First Australians at the Australian Museum in Sydney, but the only museum director in Australia to show interest in acquiring paintings was Colin Jack-Hinton, at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. Bob Edwards, formerly the curator of anthropology at the South Australian Museum, arranged for a collection of Papunya paintings to be given to the Art Gallery of South Australia in 1978. Ironically, this is now considered amongst the most important components of the gallery’s entire collection.

  With sales stagnating, a number of hopeful Papunya painters began travelling to Alice Springs to work for Pat Hogan, who provided them with high-quality art materials and a place to paint in town. The quality of these paintings varied greatly, however, and sales were so slow that Hogan could not afford to keep buying them. To stimulate sales, the Federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs decided to provide funding for The Company to build the Centre for Aboriginal Artists and Craftsmen in Todd Street, Alice Springs. Due to the continuing controversy surrounding the content of early men’s paintings, Dick Kimber and Fred Myers advised the centre’s new manager to remove all sensitive paintings to a ‘men’s only’ room at the back of the gallery.

  The decision by the Board and remote Aboriginal-run organisations to continue encouraging production despite the lack of sales was an example of the stark difference between the Aboriginal and European economic mindset. All Aboriginal people believe in the causal link between art, ceremony and the abundance of food. Board members deeply versed in traditional culture, such as Wandjuk Marika, participated in yearly increase ceremonies to ensure seasonal abundance. As painting was becoming a new form of ceremonial activity, their decision to encourage the production and purchase of artworks in vast quantity was probably made in order to manifest abundance. An alternative to simply giving out grants, it meant that people would literally have money to buy food.

  Sales may have stagnated, but the Board’s non-Indigenous directors such as Bob Edwards could see the potential appeal of Aboriginal art for both Australian and international audiences. Faced with languishing sales in Australia, the AAB made a bold strategic move. It decided to bypass the largely unsympathetic local market and tour exhibitions overseas. The first, Art of Aboriginal Australia, was sponsored by the international tobacco giant Rothmans of Pall Mall. It toured to 13 venues in Canada between 1974 and 1976. The Peter Stuyvesant Trust followed suit. Bob Edwards developed the international exhibition program, while Dorothy Bennett collected works in the field, and Jennifer Isaacs acted as the primary consultant and curator. Amongst those who worked on these projects were Anthony Wallis and Kate Khan, now a senior (anthropology research) fellow at the Australian Museum.

  Bob Edwards working in the field, Central Australia, c. 1965. A passionate advocate for Indigenous art, he helped to devise one of the most ‘subtle and brilliant marketing exercises’ in the history of Australian art.

  No less than 20 exhibitions toured overseas venues between 1974 and the end of the decade. In the process Aboriginal art was shown in 40 countries located in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America, the British Isles and the Pacific Islands. In what was ‘one of the most subtle and brilliant marketing exercises’30 in the history of Australian art, these exhibitions fed off large international events. They included art conferences and festivals such as the World Craft Conference in Canada in 1974, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in Nigeria in 1977, and the Festival of Pacific Arts in New Zealand and New Guinea, in 1976 and 1980. Exhibitions shown during these events were accompanied by Aboriginal authors and performing artists. If this were still being done, the industry would be in a far better position than it is today.

  Coverage in prestigious international art magazines and other media outlets exceeded all expectations. More than 10 million people visited these exhibitions, but the Australian media remained comparatively disinterested. Almost all of the art and craft that toured overseas was donated to the participating museums, thereby continuing to reach audiences over the years that followed. While much remains overseas to this day, many of the finest pieces eventually returned to be auctioned by Sotheby’s after it began holding contemporary Aboriginal art sales 20 years later.

  On reflection, this international success was also made possible by the readiness of senior painters, like the Papunya men, to reveal elements of their culture to outsiders by transposing them onto new materials. In doing so, they committed a revolutionary act. During the Board’s first year a delegation of Papunya artists including Long Jack Phillipus, Tim Leura and others travelled to Sydney to support and advise on the Board’s exciting new policies. This was one of those great moments in Aboriginal history. People in government were actually interested in their opinion; however, the artists were surprised by the intensity of the disapproval that greeted them. When asked about the ethics of selling their art for profit they made this reply: ‘We are not turning our heritage into cash – we want the whole world to know of our culture.’31

  In order to stimulate the Australian market, the AAB staged a landmark exhibition Art of the Western Desert at the Australian National University in March 1975, sponsored by the Pet
er Stuyvesant Trust. The exhibition included 30 works, created by 13 of the first Papunya painters, and toured no less than 44 venues over the following five years, before being gifted to the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

  The hugely popular folk singer/songwriter Ted Egan became the first Director of the Aboriginal Artists Agency, which was established by the Australia Council in 1976 to assist artists in the field of copyright. Egan eventually handed it over to Anthony Wallis, the AAB’s first project officer, who has managed it ever since.

  Two important films were made in 1977 and 1978: the BBC’s documentary The Desert Dreamers screened as part of its series The World About Us, and Geoff Bardon’s Mick and the Moon, a documentary film about Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri. Bardon’s first book, Art of the Western Desert, was published that same year.

  As the Pintupi moved west from Papunya to establish outstations adjacent to their tribal lands in the late 1970s, the most significant development was the increasing demand for larger commissioned paintings by the most popular artists. A number of these works are on the same scale as traditional sand paintings, and are now regarded as being among the most important in Aboriginal art. Clifford Possum and Tim Leura, in particular, created topographical depictions of the landscape which were notable for their brilliant manipulation of three-dimensional space.

  The two men collaborated on a series of monumental paintings by incorporating several Dreaming stories in map-like configurations. One of these, an 8.2-metre canvas, Warlugulong, painted in 1976, was exhibited in the 1981 Australian Perspecta and is now in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Another, Napperby Spirit Dreaming, created at the beginning of the 1980s, was the principal painting in the landmark Dreamings exhibition (1988–1989) held at the Asia Society in New York, having been loaned from the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria. In this seven-metre long masterpiece, Clifford Possum’s crisp travelling line and central row of circles contrast with Leura’s moody dissolution of solid form. Leura became ill not long after finishing this work, and wandered lost and disoriented before sadly dying in hospital of a brain tumor. Both of these collaborative works have been held in the collections of major institutions since the 1980s.

  Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Warlugulong, 1976. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 202 x 337.5 cm.

  Clifford Possum’s monumental 1977 masterpiece Warlugulong took a more serendipitous and circuitous route into the collection of the National Gallery of Australia in 2007. It hung high above the servery of a Melbourne cafeteria throughout the 1980s, and was purchased for $39,000 in 1996 by art dealer Hank Ebes, owner of the Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings in Bourke Street, Melbourne. It held pride of place amongst a treasure trove of important Indigenous paintings in his private collection for the following 11 years. Sotheby’s featured the work on the wrap-around cover of its July 2007 catalogue and advertised it with a presale estimate of, wait for it, $1,800,000–$2,500,000. In what is indicative of the rapid rise in interest and change in the dynamics of the Aboriginal art market during the early years of this millennium, the 2 x 3.4 metre painting sold for $2,400,000, a record for an Australian Aboriginal artwork that is likely to stand for a very, very long time.

  Today, the vast majority of people with a casual interest in Aboriginal art associate it almost exclusively with desert painting. Yet when I began my own involvement in 1981, a decade after Geoff Bardon first arrived in Papunya, bark paintings from Arnhem Land were still considered the epitome of Aboriginal art. As time progressed, desert artists developed many regionally specific styles, and a code of abstract symbolism that borrowed heavily from their inherited tactile and visual culture. In the process the painters were transformed from accurate recorders of ethnographic information into ‘artists’, free to arrange the symbolism and imagery in their paintings according to their own individual aesthetic judgement. As desert painting expanded throughout the 1980s its popularity eventually completely eclipsed that of all other Aboriginal art.

  Of those who began the Western Desert art movement, only Billy Stockman, Long Jack Phillipus and Ronnie Tjampitjinpa are alive at the time of writing this book. Along with Johnny Warangkula and Timmy Payungka, they painted well into the 1990s. Mick Namarari, Turkey Tolson and Ronnie Tjampitjinpa all played a vital role in initiating the movement of Pintupi men’s painting toward linear abstraction during the 1990s. Amongst the last survivors of their generation, Johnny Warangkula, John Jakamarra and Turkey Tolson died just as the new millennium began. Larger than life to the very end, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri passed away in 2002.

  Those artists at the centre of that vital establishment phase of Western Desert art also included Anatjari Tjakamarra, Uta Uta Tjangala, Charlie Tarawa Tjungurrayi, Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungarrayi, John Kipara Tjakamarra, Old Walter Tjampitjinpa, Shorty Lungkata Tjungurrayi, Old Mick Walankari Tjakamarra, David Corby Tjapaltjari, Paddy Stewart Tjapaltjarri, Tutama Tjapangarti, Nosepeg Tjupurrula and Anatjari Tjampitjinpa.

  Other than Tim Leura who died in 1984, most of these artists created generic Tingari paintings throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, and in spite of their elevated reputations the majority of their works languish when offered for sale in the secondary market today. Almost without exception, all of these artists’ reputations rest on those few works that they created between 1971 and 1972 when working alongside their friend and mentor Geoffrey Bardon. This tiny window is now recognised as a pivotal moment in the history of Australian art – when a few marginalised Aboriginal men and a troubled young white art teacher initiated a major, internationally acclaimed, contemporary art movement.

  THE END OF THE 1970s – A SNAPSHOT

  After I graduated from university in 1971, I worked for ABC Rural Radio and the New South Wales Department of Agriculture for a year, before taking off with my young bride, Julie, on the hippie overland trail across Asia, just like thousands of other Australians my age. We did not return home for four years. We studied batik in Jogjakarata, lolled around in Chiang Mai, travelled up the Mekong, hitchhiked a ride to Pnom Penh in an army cargo plane full of screaming pigs, and spent a year studying Buddhist meditation in India. In the north of England we lived in an old mill house while I worked in a bakery. In Israel I became the volunteers’ manager on a kibbutz. I was adopted into a Yemenite family, studied Hebrew, attended classes at the uni in Tel Aviv, and could easily have stayed forever. But my first marriage was crumbling, and I returned to Sydney hoping to patch it together. I started applying for jobs, and it was rather dispiriting to be knocked back time after time, because I had no work record in Australia. On the weekends I flogged hammocks, kites and hand printed T-shirts (long before Mambo or Ken Done) at the Paddington flea markets. Then Julie and I moved to the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, where we opened a restaurant, The Bay Tree Tea Shop, which is still flourishing.

  One of the jobs I didn’t get was the position of art adviser in the remote Central Arnhem Land community of Ramingining. Having fired off a raft of applications for development roles in Third World countries which met with no success, I was surprised to make the short list for this job. The subsequent interview was my first experience with the Aboriginal bureaucracy and the nascent art industry and I was elated to have made it so far. It was conducted by Chris Fondum at the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in Canberra. I was informed that there were few, if any resources, and that the accommodation consisted of a broken-down caravan on the edge of the community. The position was eventually filled by a young Bundjalung man, John (later Djon) Mundine, who thereby became the first Indigenous art adviser appointed to a community art centre. I confess I was almost relieved when I didn’t make the final cut. This makes me laugh now, after decades of swagging out on the side of corrugated roads, but in those days I wasn’t ready for such an isolated life.

  The 1970s were a time of naiveté, enthusiasm and promise. In the barely developed art market, only a small number of communities were producing ‘tribal’ objects for sale. The few available han
dmade and printed items predated licensed or manufactured product. There were no books that could help to unlock the mystery of Indigenous culture other than catalogues and brochures produced by the Aboriginal Arts Board (AAB). The Company operated a wholesale warehouse in Harrington Street, Sydney, and Peter Brokensha32 operated a large retail outlet in the Argyle Art Centre nearby in Sydney’s Rocks district. Anthony ‘Ace’ Bourke and Gabriella Roy both began working with Aboriginal artists in this fledgling commercial environment.

  After vainly trying to place Aboriginal art in Sydney’s top commercial galleries in the early 1970s, Jennifer Isaacs began to build an Aboriginal art collection for prominent bon vivant, Clive Evatt Jnr. Evatt had been a notorious barrister whose high profile clients included the gangster Abe Saffron, his brother-in-law the architect Harry Seidler, Bob Dylan’s alleged sex slave Emilia Caruana, and the actress Gypsy Fire. After a financial scandal he was struck off for 14 years, and managed to support himself at the track. Having grown up surrounded by art, he decided to study fine art at Sydney University under Bernard Smith before opening the Hogarth Galleries, which he reputedly accepted in lieu of a bad debt on a horse race. He famously bought a painting from Brett Whiteley with a boot full of cash after a massive win – it is considered by those who have seen it to be Whiteley’s best work, and its estimated worth today exceeds $5 million.

  The Hogarth Galleries was Sydney’s first privately owned commercial gallery of Aboriginal fine art, and its founding director, Kerry Steinberg (better known by her maiden name, Williams), continued to build the collection, and run the gallery. For a period of eight years, at least a decade before institutions began purchasing in any quantity directly from the communities, a significant proportion of the Australian National Gallery’s collection benefited from Kerry Steinberg’s expert eye.33